Ground here is only earned on foot

How claims are checked, what happens when you report someone, and what we don't claim

What your phone checks, as you walk

Three things have to hold for ground to be claimed, and they're checked continuously, not at the end:

• You were on foot. Movement above running pace claims nothing. If the phone's motion sensors recognise a car, a bus or a bike, nothing is claimed for as long as that lasts.
• Your Apple Watch's own workouts count too. A walk, run or hike recorded by the Watch's Workout app is replayed through the same rules when the app next opens — the Watch recorded it with its own GPS, and Health marks it as the Watch's, which nothing else can imitate. Sessions that reach Health from another app, a service or a file light your own map and never claim.
• Your steps match the distance. The phone's step counter is a separate sensor from GPS. Cover real distance with almost no steps and the walk claims no ground at all. This is the check that matters most, because faking a location is easy and faking the step count at the same time is not.
• The location is real. iOS tells an app when a location is being simulated. A walk with simulated locations claims nothing.

A walk that fails any of these still counts. It's saved, it counts as a day out, it keeps your streak and it shows on your own map. It just takes no ground, and the app says so on the recap rather than quietly dropping it.

What the server does with it

The phone's word isn't the last one. Every upload is judged again on the server: it applies the same rule to what the walk reported about itself, it pins claim times into the last day so nobody can backdate their way in ahead of a rival, and it decides for itself what a loop does to each hexagon inside it, so a protection is the server's call and never the phone's.

It also writes a line down for every upload, accepted or refused: when it arrived, the day the phone said it was, how many hexagons it carried and how many stuck, and what that walk's own checks reported. A handful of numbers. Not a route. That record is the thing a cheating report is answered with, which is why the refusals are kept too.

What a loop can and can't do

Closing a loop claims what it encloses, up to two blocks in from the path you actually walked — so a lap around a district still only reaches two blocks in from your steps. Empty ground fills. A hexagon somebody holds loses a layer, exactly as if you had stepped on it, and changes hands only once it has none left.

That is the trade a loop makes. It reaches ground your feet never touched, so it obeys every rule a footfall obeys. One big lap around a neighbourhood does not hand you the neighbourhood: it peels a layer off the people who walk it, and takes only what nobody has walked in a while.

Nothing is held by a clock

No hexagon is ever safe just because it was claimed recently. We tried it the other way — a claim was shielded for twelve hours — and it meant you could walk a street, find someone had been there that morning, and have your own legs count for nothing. That is the opposite of what this game is for.

What defends ground is walking it. A claim is born with one layer, which is your own footfall. Every further pass over your own hexagon adds another, up to five. Every rival walk takes one off, and the walk that finds none takes the hexagon. So a hexagon you walk often costs somebody several real walks to take, and one you claimed once and never returned to costs them one. Layers fade a notch per fortnight, because ground nobody walks should not stay hard forever.

One more rule, which is about honesty rather than defence: a walk can never crack or take a hexagon that was claimed after the walker stood on it. The board is decided by whose feet were there last, not by whose phone uploaded last, so leaving a walk unsent all day buys nothing.

When you report a player

Tap anyone's patch on the map, open the menu on their card, and report them. Then:

• A person reads it — with that player's claim record beside it: when each of their walks arrived, what their phone's checks said, and the pace their claims imply between hexagons.
• Ground is removed from the map only when that record backs up the report. It isn't handed to whoever reported them — the point is that faked ground stops counting, not that reporting pays. Nobody loses anything on a hunch, and every verdict is written down.
• Nothing about your own walks is sent with a report, and the player reported is never told who reported them.
• You can hide someone's ground from your own map straight away, separately from reporting them. That's yours alone and changes nothing about the game.

What we don't claim

We'd rather be believed than impressive, so here is the honest limit. The checks that read your steps and your speed run on your phone, because that is where the sensors are — which means a determined person with a modified app on a modified phone can lie about what their walk was, and the server can only judge what it is told. No app on any platform can prove otherwise.

What we can say is what happens when someone tries. The rules the server owns — no backdating, no loop reaching further than two blocks from your steps, no claim written without a record — hold regardless of what the phone says. Every upload is on that record, including the refused ones. And a report puts it in front of a person, who can take faked ground off the map.

We don't publish the exact thresholds. Not to be mysterious, but because a published number is a recipe.

What we never store

The fairness work never became an excuse to collect more. The server never receives the path you walked, a trace of your movement, or where you are between walks — only the hexagons you claimed and one time for each, as before. The line per upload is exactly that: per upload, not per hexagon, because a dense enough series of times is a route by another name. Where a review mentions pace, it is worked out from the times on hexagons you already claimed, not from anything extra we started collecting. Reports carry no coordinates. The full detail is in the privacy policy.

Something looks wrong?

If a real walk of yours was refused, that's a bug and we want it. If someone's ground looks impossible, report them in the app, or write to us: bdushnitzky@gmail.com.